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Iraq feels like it’s on brink of cataclysmic civil war

Shiite tribal fighters take up arms Friday to help the Iraqi military defend Baghdad. The tribal leaders declared their readiness to battle the al-Qaida-inspired group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has made advances in Iraq's Sunni heartland. Photo: Karim Kadim/The Associated Press

IRBIL, Iraq — The capital of the Kurdish autonomous region was an oasis of calm in an increasingly dangerous sea of chaos Friday. But there is an agonizing sense of foreboding here over how Iraq’s Kurdish minority might become drawn into the tragedy happening as close as an hour’s drive away in Mosul, where Sunni ultra-fundamentalists have imposed a draconian interpretation of the Qur’an amid reports of summary executions.

At least 30,000 young Shiite volunteers responded immediately Friday to an appeal by the country’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend Baghdad against the al-Qaida-inspired Sunnis who took several more towns during the day as they inched on three sides within 80 kilometres of the capital.

Such reports have helped feed a national hysteria that has everyone thinking there will be civil war. Because Iraq has far more people than neighbouring Syria and because trillions of dollars in energy resources are at stake, the conflict is likely to be worse than the Syrian one, in which more than 100,000 people have been killed.

With Iraqi government forces still almost nowhere to be seen, and rival militias vowing mayhem, the prospect of all-out sectarian warfare between the Shiite majority, which now rules the country, and the Sunni minority who had everything its way during the days of Saddam Hussein, has never felt more real or more ominous.

It is almost certain that Iraq is going to explode in cataclysmic fighting, with Baghdad and the country’s many oilfields, refineries and pipelines as the prizes. Once the battle for the capital begins it is hard to see how Iraq — which was patched together by the French and the British about 100 years ago — will avoid being shattered into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish fiefdoms. This would in turn destabilize an already brittle arc in the Middle East that runs from Lebanon through Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Iran.

Irbil is less than an hour’s drive from Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, which fell on Tuesday to insurgents from the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Just to the south, the Kurds’ formidable militia, the peshmerga, seized control of oil-rich Kirkuk on Wednesday, although there were reports here Friday that the insurgents had started to fight to get it back.

Kurdish news outlets reported Friday that ISIL forces were aiming to capture towns along Iraq’s eastern border with Iran. Other reports suggested that several hundred Iranian soldiers had crossed into Iraq to support this country’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

U.S. President Barack Obama remained paralyzed about how to respond to what has suddenly emerged as one of the greatest tests of his presidency. Speaking on the White House lawn, the president said Friday that he needed several more days to come up with a plan to reverse the ISIL’s gains. At the same time he vowed that under no circumstances would the U.S. be sending combat forces back to Iraq.

As Obama spoke, CNN reported that the USS George H.W. Bush had slipped into the Persian Gulf from the Arabian Sea. This is naked gunboat diplomacy, but it is hard to imagine how the aircraft carrier’s pilots would be able to find targets. The Sunni extremists have no headquarters, bases or obvious means of communication beyond their ubiquitous cellphones. Rather, they drive around in Mad Max-style pickup trucks, man small checkpoints, and live and travel among the civilian population, creating a situation in which it is difficult to tell friends from foes.

Still, the Kurds have taken in as many as 300,000 refugees from Mosul, a generous gesture considering the tensions in Iraq. Many of them are in Irbil.

Bewildered newcomers spoke Friday about how ISIL forces appeared as if from thin air, while Iraqi police and troops who were to defend them, disappeared into the same thin air.

Kurds have followed the endless blitz of new developments with morbid fascination and a sense of dread. Television newscasts repeatedly played cellphone videos in which zealous Shiites are seen signing up to fight triumphant Sunnis, who are seen dancing on captured tanks and appear to publicly execute members of Iraq’s security forces.

There were also dire reports that Islamic radicals have already imposed their draconian religious beliefs on relatively moderate Mosul. Flyers were distributed ordering women to stay inside unless absolutely necessary; even then they must wear the most conservative Islamic garb. Alcohol and cigarettes have been banned. International agencies report summary executions.

Among the fighters headed for Baghdad are some who were forced out of the Syrian city of Aleppo this spring after several years of savage fighting against Bashar Assad’s regime. It is astonishing that they were able to take Mosul with such ease because no more than 1,000 of them took part in the assault. Still, in a matter of hours they managed to rout a much better-armed and better-equipped U.S.-trained force of 30,000, which conveniently abandoned its weapons and other gear as it disappeared.

That all this happened so quickly and with little actual fighting has lent credence to widespread rumours here that Sunni tribal leaders had made a deal beforehand with ISIL because they hated al-Maliki more than they hated religious zealots.

Curiously, these same tribal leaders worked with American troops only two years ago to try to rid Iraq of Sunni extremism. In another strange development, the U.S. continues to support al-Maliki’s unpopular government, although it is increasingly aligned with Washington’s sworn enemy, Tehran.

Matthew Fisher is Postmedia's international affairs columnist and Canada's longest serving foreign correspondent. He has lived and worked abroad for 31 years in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and... read more, more recently, Afghanistan. His assignments have taken him to 162 countries, all U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories, above the North Pole and to an iceberg over the Magnetic North Pole. During his travels he has been an eyewitness to 19 wars and conflicts. The personal highlight of his career as a roaming correspondent was when he attended Nelson Mandela's inauguration in Pretoria.View author's profile